PDF-XChange Editor Plus

About this release

The first thing anyone notices about this editor is how quickly it opens. Documents that make heavier PDF applications sit on a splash screen for half a minute are on screen and scrollable here almost immediately, including scanned files with hundreds of pages and print ready files with embedded fonts and heavy vector artwork. That speed carries through search, page extraction and export.

Editing is genuine rather than an overlay. Text in the content stream can be selected, retyped and reflowed within its block, fonts can be matched or substituted, and images can be replaced, moved, cropped or resampled in place. Pages are reordered, rotated, split, merged, resized and renumbered from a thumbnail panel that handles multiple open documents at once.

The Plus edition adds the form work. Fillable forms are built from scratch or generated from an existing layout, with text fields, checkboxes, radio groups, dropdowns, calculated fields and validation rules, and the result exports as data that a spreadsheet can read. Digital signature fields, stamping and certificate handling are all present.

The annotation and review side is thorough enough for a document that has to go around a team. Highlights, notes, callouts, measurement tools, drawing tools and typewriter text all carry author information, and the comment list can be filtered, replied to, summarised and printed. Optical character recognition turns scans into searchable text without changing how the page looks.

What it does

Genuine text editing

Edit the text in the content stream with font matching, reflow within a block and paragraph level changes.

Fast on heavy documents

Large scanned and print ready files open and scroll without the long stall other editors need.

Form designer

Build fillable forms with calculated fields and validation, and export the collected data for a spreadsheet.

Full annotation set

Highlights, notes, callouts, stamps, measurement and drawing tools with a filterable comment list.

Optical character recognition

Turn scans into searchable text across many languages while leaving the page appearance intact.

Page assembly

Reorder, split, merge, rotate, resize and renumber pages across several open documents from one thumbnail panel.

Changed in this version

• Rendering engine reworked for faster first page display on very large files.
• Text editing handles mixed font runs more cleanly when reflowing a paragraph.
• Recognition accuracy improved on low contrast and skewed scans.
• Form field calculation order can now be set explicitly.
• Comment summary export gains a compact layout option.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive and run the installer.
2. Choose which recognition language packs to install, since they take significant space.
3. Decide during setup whether the editor becomes the default PDF handler.
4. Open a large document once so the render cache initialises.

Worth knowing before you start

File details